Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. When we talk about class, it's more than just money, right?

It's clothing, it manners, and norms, and history, and attitude. Money gives you access to this

in-group of whatever we consider high class, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee you entry.

Rob Franklin's debut novel, Great Black Hope,

digs into these differences of what high class means for a black family in the South

versus a couple of white kids in the Hamptons.

But also, in this interview with NPR's Aisha Roscoe,

they talk about the challenge of trying to write a character

who is sympathetic to the reader,

but who can also buy his way out of some of his problems.

That's ahead.

We first meet David Smith Jr., simply known as Smith in a nightclub in the Hamptons.

But the party is about to come to a quick inn.

Picture him stumbling. Six feet and three inches, he towered like a tree, bark brown and quietly

handsome. Picture him crouched in a corner as he snorts from a key, the metallic taste of his

tongue. The night gleamed back into clarity as he steadied himself to return,

when out of the crowd two men emerged, stern-eyed and square-jawed, barking orders he could barely

discern. Cormly, he followed. He didn't wish to make a scene, out through a side exit and on

to the street, silent but for the base of a bob that had rained

on the charts all summer. That's Rob Franklin, reading about Smith's arrest for cocaine possession

from his debut novel, Great Black Hope. It's a study of a young, black, queer, privileged man

who's floated through the high society scene of his richer white friends

...